On Oct. 19, AFR Executive Director Lisa Donner participated in a virtual conference organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Entitled “Empowering the public to assess large bank resiliency, the conference brought together leading experts to bank transparency to discuss how to maintain and improve transparency of the conditions of major banks.
Wall Street is pumping tremendous sums of money into the 2020 elections, and there are some notable trends regarding who is getting the money and who, within the financial services industry, is contributing this cycle. At the presidential level, Wall Street is splitting its contributions close to evenly, or maybe slightly favoring Biden over Trump. At the same time, it is fairly clear that Wall Street is investing in keeping the Senate in Republican hands.
It has been more than ten years since the Obama Administration signed into law the Dodd Frank Act, a set of modest financial regulations that were meant to address the causes of the Great Recession. Since then many of the regulations have been weakened and whittled down. But a new poll finds strong public support, across the political spectrum for Wall Street to be held to account.
A group of financial reform, labor, and public interest organizations today warned the Federal Reserve not to water down rules that limit the access of companies owned by private equity firms to emergency lending facilities created during the COVID-19 pandemic. Allies of the industry have pressed the Fed to loosen the affiliation rules for its new Main Street Lending Facility, a step that would ease the way for private equity to access public money despite its ready access to capital markets and uninvested capital.
A provision inserted by Sen. Mike Crapo, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, would encourage Trump-appointed regulators, who have already sought to reduce the minimum amounts of their own risk capital that banks have to hold during the COVID-19 pandemic, to go further. Sen. Susan Collins, sponsor of the part of Dodd-Frank in 2010 that Crapo wants to gut, has already filed an amendment that would strike the part of Republican bill that would make this change. The Senate should follow her lead and preserve minimum statutory thresholds for bank capital.
Cross-border derivatives regulation is the latest area in which Trump appointees are systematically dismantling the post-2008 framework for regulation of Wall Street and the global “too big to fail” banks. Today, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission drastically weakened their rules governing the massive global markets for financial derivatives.
To mark the tenth anniversary of President Obama signing the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act into law, Americans for Financial Reform hosted a series of virtual events asking what we have learned, and what changes we think are needed now to protect consumers, uproot systemic racism, and transform finance so that it contributes to a resilient, equitable and sustainable economy.
Now that Wall Street is reporting earnings for a quarter that took place entirely during the coronavirus pandemic, it is clear that the Federal Reserve has bailed out the bankers quite effectively. Workers, families, small businesses, states, and municipalities have not fared nearly as well.
This major crisis demands a massive and swift response, but it must focus first on health care, and then on easing the burdens on everyday people, communities, and small businesses who are hardest hit. The McConnell proposal falls far, far short of what the situation demands.
Apart from the obvious fact that this is a public health crisis and should be treated as such, we should all be immensely skeptical of any suggestion from Wall Street that it needs a bailout or any kind of assistance. We need to help people, not profits.